On "Jewry"

Is there such a thing?

2025 has been the year of normalizing criticism of Israel. Tucker, Candace, Joe Rogan, Dave Smith — lots of “mainstream” people have begun to recognize that Israel’s policies are brutal and misaligned with the global moral post-war consensus. That makes a lot of people think they’re red-pilled now.

I’m here to say: have you considered that you’re being played like a fiddle? Have you considered that this roll-out of Israel criticism is planned, scheduled, and intentional? Yes, you’re free to criticize Israel now. But is that the whole problem? Is the nation-state of Israel the extent of the problem?

Historically, there was no such thing as “the Israel Question.” Instead, there was a sense of international Jewry: the Jewish question. Everyone in Christendom from Boston to Moscow used to understand that Jews are a nation that happens to be international. For centuries, they stuck together in spite of being separated by citizenship, borders, and even language differences.

But now we’ve arrived at this juncture: you can criticize Israel, but you have to treat individual Jews as atomized individuals. You have to act as if there is no such thing as international Jewry. This is a new moral commandment, and it’s one that doesn’t jive with historical norms. In fact, ChatGPT hasn’t even got the memo yet. Very plainly and without prologue, I asked it about this dynamic, and it said,

[Jewish] diasporic nationalism is not a conspiracy but a cultural fact. It’s how Jews preserved identity through exile, ghettoization, persecution, and dispersion.

To which any literate person replies, “Duh.” At least, until very recently.

The idea that “you can criticize Israel but not Jews” is an extension of the logic of liberalism, which demands that each individual be treated as an atomized individual and without regard to tribe or national affiliation. Historically, of course (needless to say), this was not the norm: there was no Israel. Going back to the time of Tacitus at least (which is to say, to pre-Christian times), Jews were universally understood to be an international tribe. It’s only since Zionism rose as an idea, and particularly since Vatican 2 helped to solidify the so-called post-WW2 consensus, that mentioning “the Jews” as the Jews has become taboo.

One of the many sculptures alluding to the blindness of “the Jews”

Yet, if the modern church with its Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae documents insists on treating every individual human being as an atomized individual without regard to tribal or national affiliation, that was not the practice of the church for its middle thousand years. The church did not hem and haw about collective judgment when it carved a blind synagoga into the exterior walls of its cathedrals, nor was it so parsimonious when it ruled in the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that all Jews (and all Saracens) should be made to wear identifiable clothing, and should be banned from public office. And again, the many countries that expelled Jews (from France in 1254, from England in 1290, from Hungary in 1360, etc.) did so in collective terms, not worrying about the modern idea of individual rights.

Neither were Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Tertullian, Ælfric of Eynsham, Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky so parsimonious. The essay in Dostoevsky’s Writers’s Diary hinges on the idea that “the Jews” maintain a state-within-the-state when they are in diaspora, and accuses them of harboring more prejudice against the native population than the native population could ever conceive against them.